Friday, June 16, 2017

More QATAR from someone who knows something

Gary Sick:

Gary Sick, a scholar at Columbia University, served on the
National Security Council under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan and was the principal White House aide for Iran during
the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis.

He writes: "First, as a member of the US policy team that first applied sanctions
against Iran when our diplomats were being held hostage in Tehran, we
drew the line at food and medicine. That has remained true in the
succeeding 37 years. Despite all the onerous sanctions that the US has
imposed against Iran over the years, which verge on economic warfare,
there has never been a formal restriction on sales of food or medicine,
including by US companies. The Saudi-UAE boycott, however, closed off
food and medicine shipments to Qatar wherever possible, in the middle of
Ramadan. I don’t know if this technically constitutes a breach of
international humanitarian law, but it is certainly drastic by modern
standards of political conflict."

He goes on to make several other telling points, including the fact that the U.S. military does not seem to be in sync with Donald Trump's pronouncements on the subject. LobeLog

14 comments:

We've been having a rather thorough re-airing of just war doctrine and theories, and maybe it's time to start talking about just sanctions. Embargoes and blockades are as old as war. The country they are done to is inclined to see them as acts of war. Only in this nuclear age have we all been inclined to pretend they maybe are not but are, rather, "means short of war."

One thing we know from the study of sieges ancient and modern -- a blockade is just a siege without catapults -- is that of the ever shrinking supplies of the necessities of life, the warriors get the lion's share. And the lion's share is everything the lion wants. There is no way the blockader can assure that food and medicines that are allowed past the blockade will be distributed to women and children first. In fact, the blockader must be fairly certain they won't be. So even in a "humane" action the blockader is relying on the suffering of women and children to eventually make the well-fed and cared-for warriors more amenable to what the blockader is trying to make them do.

TB: Quite right...The new sanctions on Iran and Russia voted by the U.S. Senate this week are said to be targeted but what is their ripple effect. The combination of anti-Russian and pro-Israel sentiments in the Senate made this happen. When will we see the blow back?

Plowing through my reading on the end of WW1, the British blockade of Germany via the North Sea is clearly a significant element in Germany's surrender and the chaos that followed. Kathe Kollowitz's drawings capture the state of the civilian population in the midst of starvation conditions.

The sanctions against Iraq after the Gulf War, to which Sick refers, and which was the subject of a lively debate in Commonweal had an additional element that obscured the "moral" issues, i.e., Saddam Hussein took advantage of the sanctions using resources still available for his own use and that of the military and created severe shortages of medical supplies and equipment.

Here is the debate I had with Joy Gordon, who wrote a book on the subject. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/better-war

Thanks for that link, Margaret. The alternative to sanctions after the '91 war would have been marching all the way to Baghdad and rebuilding the nation into a copy of Des Moines. Unusually for history, we had almost a laboratory experiment of that alternative in 2003. And so here we are now in 2017, an what you said in 2012 holds up even more strongly: "Now that the Iraq war is over and we see its gruesome and wasteful course, isn’t there good reason to ask whether maintenance of sanctions might have been a more humane and moral policy?"

The last fight I had as a lad ended with me astride my opponent (not the usual ending, btw), pounding his head against frozen ground and crying because the dope refused give up, and I was afraid I'd hurt him seriously if we had to keep on doing what we were doing.

Yes, knowing when to stop; knowing when to surrender; knowing when to claim victory and leave!

Your last sentence bears some resemblance to Peter Steinfels's introductory remarks to his introduction to a Just War calculus... CWL 6/5/17

"All my life I have been haunted by Catholic teachings on just war. Well, I exaggerate. It was not until age three that I launched my first allegedly just war against my older brother James. Nonetheless, by the end of grade school I was semi-fluent in the teachings about just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, likely success, no deliberate attacks on noncombatants, and proportionality in means and ends."

So far...Has Trump been in sync with the people he's appointed? Perhaps some...Pruitt, Perdue, Devos, Carson...

I think Matthis and Tillerson know a lot about the areas they are overseeing (a lot more than Trump), and each has his own views of the issues. Both have experience and knowledge of the ME and while they might not have agreed with Obama's "keep your distance," from internal quarrels (as in the Saudis and their neighbors), they both are likely to value having a major military base in Qatar and want to keep it there. My impression is that Mattis is a hard-liner on Iran and has misgivings on the Iran nuclear deal.

McMaster's head of the NSA is puzzling. I wonder if he is actually in control of the people who work for him.

Iran might not like the U.S., and the U.S. doesn't like Iran, but each has a lot to gain from better relations...Iran is the key, I think, to a calmer ME, and we make a mistake in poking their nose (i.e., the latest sanctions added to the Russia sanctions bill).

It seems like sanctions most often end up hurting the wrong people. Do they ever really work to force the desired behavior of a government?On a related note, I see that Trump is restoring some sanctions with Cuba, citing human rights concerns. Of course there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about human rights in Cuba. But if 50 years worth of embargoes, sanctions what have you, have failed to have the desired result, why would restoring them now have any better chance? Of course the cynic in me believes it is just Trump shaking off Obama cooties and pandering to the Cuban expats in Florida.

I'll be interested to see whether Trump's Cuba policy actually goes anywhere. It's likely to do as much damage to U.S. interests as to Cuba's. I'm going to bet that the picture of Trump before a cheering group of Cuban-Americans will be the last we hear of this. Could be wrong. But I think that ship sailed with Obama and it's not going back to port.

The "Hill" has a rundown of the new policy. Looks like a sieve to me. And what's to keep Americans from traveling there from Canada or Mexico (and the Cubans will oblige by not stamping your passport).

“One lesson of recent history is clear, however,” he continued, directing his advice to fellow Americans. “The prospects in the Muslim world would be brighter if both the tearing down and the building up were done by Muslims rather than by us. Berliners brought down the wall; yet it was we who overthrew Iraq’s dictator, not the Iraqis.”

I've read "A Peace to End....," obviously shaped my thinking... must take a look again. The obit also mentions "Europe's Last Summer." Must track that down.

The last sentence in the obit, a quote from Fromkin, is challenging and debatable: "Life is a story that each of us tells to his or her self, and it is therefore is a tale told by an unreliable narrator." The foundation of historiography!